“Aleman, still with me?” Her voice was loud, echoing strangely in the total darkness. There was no answer, and after a few seconds, she realized that this was because she was no longer wearing the glasses. Her face mask and rebreather were missing, too. The air on her face was hot and humid. She sat up slowly, reaching out in every direction to explore her new environment. “Rook?”
A faint scuffing sound echoed out of the darkness. She whirled, rolling onto hands and knees, coming up in a defensive crouch, hands raised to meet the unseen threat.
Damn it. I can’t even tell what direction it’s coming from.
“Right here, babe.”
The wave of relief at hearing Rook’s voice left her almost giddy. “I can’t see. I lost the glasses.”
“No you didn’t.” She felt his reassuring hand on hers. “Better close your eyes.”
She did, though there was no perceptible difference. A moment later, there was a blinding flare of red that seemed to burn right through her eyelids. She scrunched her eyes closed even tighter and covered them with a cupped palm. It took several minutes for her eyes to adjust to the painful brilliance enough to lower her hands and even attempt opening her eyes. The light felt like grains of sand on her corneas. She squinted through watery eyes and found Rook’s smiling face.
“Here,” he said, holding something out to her. “Try these.”
Her glasses. “So that’s where they went.” She slipped them on. The photosensitive lenses were clear, but as soon as they covered her eyes, the virtual retinal display went active in night vision mode, automatically adjusting for the intensity of Rook’s dive light.
“Why didn’t you just give me these in the first place?”
“The glasses work by projecting light directly into your eyes. If you’d put them on, it would have felt like sticking a hot poker in your eyes.”
Rook switched off his light, and in the resulting darkness, she discovered that she was finally able to see. Rook squatted calmly on the floor, eyes looking forward but seeing nothing. His mask and rebreather were also gone, discarded somewhere along the way, and his drysuit looked like it had been dragged behind a truck. Hers did, too. She rose to her feet and took a look at her surroundings.
They were in a cavern, not as large as the original cave they had first entered, but still very spacious. The walls were damp, with rivulets of water running down from above and dribbling from mineral formations that she probably could have named, if she’d spent a few minutes thinking about it. Her attention was drawn to a dark pool that occupied the center of the chamber. It was not the pool that she found so interesting, but rather a pile of stones jutting out from its shore like a dock or jetty.
Curious, she started toward it, realizing only after a few steps that Rook couldn’t see her. She hiked back and took his hand. “Why don’t you use your light?”
“I already saw everything there was to see here. Might as well save the batteries. It sounds like we might be down here a while.”
The comment reminded her that she still didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here. “What happened?”
“You got caught in a wicked current. Not sure, but I think your rebreather might have gotten banged up, or maybe you were breathing too fast. You blacked out.”
“Then how did I—why am I not dead?”
“I caught up to you and buddy breathed with you for a while.”
She gazed into his confident but completely unaware eyes. “You weren’t caught in the current, were you? You came after me on purpose?”
“I wasn’t going to leave you. You’re—” he shrugged, and looked a little embarrassed, “you know, kind of important to me.”
Because she couldn’t think of any other way to deal with the overwhelming surge of emotion rising from her chest, she pulled him close, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him.
She might have gone on kissing him, but the sound of someone politely coughing reminded her that they weren’t exactly alone. She turned toward the dock again, and led the still somewhat euphoric Rook along by the hand. “So where are we exactly?”
“I’m not sure where you are—exactly,” the familiar voice of Deep Blue said, “but I think you are somewhere below Lake Victoria, and roughly two hundred and fifty miles from Lake Natron.”
Queen stopped abruptly. “What?”
“It’s hard to be more precise. Even though the q-phone signals aren’t affected by…well, anything…you’re in a three-dimensional environment that we’ve never really had to take into account. That’s the relative distance you would have traveled if you were on the surface.”
She heard Rook laughing and guessed this wasn’t the first time Deep Blue had given this explanation. “How long were we in that river?”
“A while,” Rook said with a shrug. He didn’t hear Deep Blue clarify, “Eight hours and twenty-two minutes.”
“Shit.” That explained why they were talking to Blue instead of Aleman. Evidently, whatever crisis had occupied their remote handler had passed. Now they were the number one priority. “We couldn’t have lasted that long on one rebreather.”
“This place is like the mother of all waterpark rides,” Rook said. “That current shot us out like a cannon. We ended up in a fast moving river. There were air pockets along the way, so we didn’t have to use the rebreather the whole time. Eventually, the river dumped into the lake over there.”
“So this is the end of the road?”
“Not even close,” Deep Blue said, a little too quickly. She could tell he was trying to stay upbeat. “You’re in a massive uncharted cave formation. Something that big is bound to have more than one outlet.”
“If it did, wouldn’t someone have found it by now?”
Even though Rook could only hear Queen’s side of the conversation, he seemed to sense her despair. “Queen, this isn’t a bottomless pit. Think about what we’ve already seen. That cave back there at Lake Natron…the mall? Somebody built that, centuries ago. And I think they were using that lava tube as a sort of superhighway.”
Her pessimistic retort gave way to raw curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“We were trying to figure out why they would build their marketplace there, remember? I think it was there because that was the end of the road…this road. An underground trading route.” He gestured in the approximate direction of the lake. “See that dock? I think this was sort of a transfer station. That lava tube might have been a shallow river before the lake flooded. Or maybe it was a dry road that connected with a river. The point is, if the mall was the end of the road, then there’s a beginning. We just have to find it.”
“He’s right,” Deep Blue said. “A couple of years ago, King found evidence of a vast underground network connecting America and Europe. It’s possible that these caves are everywhere, and that the ancients knew about them and knew how to use them. Maybe this is why there are underworld legends in nearly every culture on Earth.”
Queen relayed this news to Rook.
“Isn’t the underworld the same thing as Hell?” he remarked. She reached out and gripped his hand. “Whatever, right? If anyone can walk out of Hell, it’s us.”
It felt like a lie.
The dock might have been the end of one section of the Ancients’ underground trade route, but it wasn’t the dead end Queen feared. Instead, it seemed to be a sort of crossroads, with not one but five separate passages leading away. Three of them were narrow and seemed like unlikely candidates for Rook’s superhighway, but the other two were wide openings that showed visible evidence of human use—centuries of foot travel, or perhaps pack animals and carts, had worn a ribbon-like groove down the center of each tunnel.
Rook shone his light down each of the tunnels. “Which way?”
“Flip a coin?”
He gave her a reproving look. “Not falling for that again.”
“What?”
Rook shone his light down the passage that led out of the cavern on the wall opposite the l
ake. “I say we go this way.”
“There’ll be no living with you if you get lucky on the first try.” She leaned close and gave him another kiss, this time just a peck on the cheek. “But I hope you’re right.”
They walked for a while in silence, and in Rook’s case, darkness. The tunnel continued to slope down, deeper into the Earth’s interior.
“What do you think happened to them?” Rook asked after a while.
“The Ancients? Judging by the fact that the mall was underwater, I’d say the answer is obvious.”
Rook made an unconvinced grunt.
“Look at it this way,” she went on. “There are cities today that rely almost completely on imports for survival. When the lake expanded, maybe after a volcanic eruption, and their trade route was flooded, what reason would they have had to stay? They probably were assimilated into other cultures. It’s happened before.”
“So the Ancients might not have been such a big deal after all?”
Queen gazed at him sidelong. In the darkness, he made no effort to hide his naked emotions. He might not even have realized how much his face revealed, but she could read him like a book. Mulamba’s death was weighing heavily on him. He had been desperate to find some evidence that would support Mulamba’s theory and justify the excursion to the Belgian museum, which had ended so tragically.
She thought about telling him to shake it off and soldier on, but decided that maybe it was better for him to wallow in guilt than face the much more immediate and desperate reality. They were trapped underground, hundreds of miles from the only known entrance, with no food and no way of knowing whether the path they were traveling would lead to escape or take them deeper into the unknown.
Twenty minutes later, they found further evidence of human activity: two broken pieces of carved stone that fit together to form a thick disk, with a square hole through the middle like a Chinese coin.
“It’s a wheel,” Rook said, inspecting it with his light. “Someone’s Flintstone-mobile had a blowout.”
Deep Blue was perplexed by the discovery. “Stone wheels would indicate a very primitive level of technology.”
“Do you think people were using this during the Stone Age?”
“Cavemen lived in caves,” Rook replied, unaware of the long distance conversation with Deep Blue.
“It’s a possibility,” Deep Blue said. “But metal working wasn’t a universal discovery. Metal tools were almost unknown in the Americas until the European discovery of the New World. Regardless, this is a significant discovery.”
“Blue says we’ve made a significant discovery,” she told Rook.
“Cool. Does that mean we’ll be famous?”
“More importantly,” the disembodied voice continued, “A wheel means that Rook is right. You’re on a road that leads somewhere. Don’t give up.”
Queen didn’t pass that along. She got the impression it was meant for her ears alone.
The silence settled back over them. Queen wrapped herself in it like a blanket. Conversation would have been an anchor to a reality that she preferred not to think about. This wasn’t like combat, where letting one’s mind wander might prove instantly fatal. This was more like a prison sentence, where the only way to deal with the fatigue and drudgery, and as she soon discovered, the gnawing hunger, was to set the autopilot and mentally unplug.
She knew it had to be even worse for Rook, who was making the same journey in total darkness. From time to time, she had to guide him around unexpected bends in the tunnel. She missed the first one, and he smacked face first into the wall, before it occurred to her that he was walking blind.
The passage rose and fell according to the whim of whatever natural processes had formed it, but the grooved pathway remained a constant. At one point, the road intersected a wide crevasse, and Queen saw more evidence of deliberate human activity. The Ancients had bridged the gap with loose stones, packed together to form an arch nearly thirty feet thick. Queen realized that it was little more than a pile of rocks suspended above the chasm and held together with little more than friction and Stone Age optimism. She balked momentarily, but Rook just walked across it, blissfully unaware of the potential danger. Feeling a little foolish, she raced to catch up with him. The bridge felt solid beneath her feet.
Shortly after crossing, the passage opened up into another large chamber. The well-worn path continued on, but then ended abruptly. The way ahead was blocked by a massive round stone. High stone walls rose on either side—loose pieces of rock that had been fitted together in a manner similar to that used at the bridge. There was a ramp of piled stone rising to the top of the wall, and at its base were openings to what she could only assume were rooms built into the wall. Queen stared at it in awe. The structure reminded her of something from the Lord of the Rings movies—the subterranean Dwarven kingdom of Moria, perhaps—but she kept that to herself to avoid a harangue from Rook. Instead, she just said, “Rook, you need to see this.”
“I already can.” He was squinting as if to sharpen his night vision. “There’s light coming from up there.”
Deep Blue confirmed Rook’s observation. “There’s definitely a light source on the other side of the wall. Your glasses automatically adjust to the ambient light conditions, so you won’t notice it.”
Rook advanced toward the wall, slowing as he reached its base, and then cautiously made his way onto the ramp. Queen stayed close, ready to intervene if necessary, but he became increasingly surefooted with each step. When he reached the top, he came to an abrupt stop, and as she slipped around him, Queen saw why.
Beyond the wall was another world.
Queen had no other words for it.
40
The cavern stretched away to the vanishing point in every direction. The high ceiling was irregular, with glistening mineral deposits reaching to the floor, creating the impression of massive support columns, but this was the least interesting feature of the cave. On its floor, at the base of the wall, was an alien landscape that made even the otherworldly surface of Lake Natron look about as strange as a duck pond.
Her first impression was that it was a forest, but she saw almost immediately that wasn’t right at all. The things that looked at a glance like trees were… She couldn’t really tell what they were, but they definitely weren’t trees. She didn’t even think they were plants. They seemed more like weird multi-colored fungal growths, crawling up stalagmites, throwing out vine-like tendrils that ended in fan-shaped crests.
It was the lights, however, that really got her attention. “What are those?”
The landscape was dotted with little fires. Blue and yellow flames erupted randomly from the midst of the weird forest. Queen lifted her glasses for a moment to look upon the sight unaided. The individual flames weren’t bright but their sum total was enough to cast the entire scene in a perpetual twilight. It’s almost bright enough to read by, she thought.
From their perch atop the wall, they could see that the road continued beyond the gate, but it did not go far. Less than a hundred yards away, the road ended at the remains of a jetty. It was almost identical to the one in the lake, only this time the stone pier extended out into a pool, at the base of a waterfall. It poured straight down out of the cavern ceiling and drained away in a slow moving river that ran parallel to the wall. The river followed the wall for a short distance before turning away into the cavern.
“If you were right about the Ancients using the river as part of their trade route,” Queen said, “then I think our chances of getting out of this alive just got a whole lot better. You up for another swim?”
“Maybe there’s a boat.”
Queen didn’t think that was very likely, but then the underground world was nothing, if not full of surprises. She peered over the edge of the exterior wall. The strange vegetation had grown right up to its base, sixty feet below. “We’re going to need to get down there somehow.”
“Check this out.” Rook knelt down for a moment and cam
e up holding a long wooden rod, tipped with a flat sliver of stone as long as his forearm. “This is an assegai, a traditional African throwing spear.”
He drew it back, striking a javelin thrower’s pose, but the wood crumbled in his grip and the stone head fell at his feet.
Queen laughed. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Rook retrieved the spear head and inspected its sharp edges. “This might come in handy,” he said, tucking it in his belt.
Queen realized it was the only tool or weapon they possessed.
They headed back down the ramp and approached the massive stone that barricaded the road. The round stone sat in a long trench. It was apparent that the Ancient engineers had designed it so it could be rolled out of the way, providing access to travelers on the subterranean highway. Wooden rods protruded from the enormous wheel, presumably to give the gatekeepers leverage, but like the spear shaft, these disintegrated when touched. Rook braced a shoulder against one edge of the stone but it refused to budge.
“I don’t think we’re getting through this way,” Queen remarked. “We’ll have to climb down the outside of the wall.”
Rook gave the stone another futile push then admitted defeat. “Why do you suppose they put this here?”
“Why does anyone build a fence? Maybe this place was some kind of border checkpoint.”
“Pretty sophisticated for a forgotten civilization. I think Joe was right about them. I bet we’ve barely scratched the surface.”
“All the more reason for us to get back to the surface,” Queen said. She was a little surprised to discover that she actually meant it. Rook’s optimism was starting to rub off on her. Every discovery they made reinforced the idea that the subterranean world was not merely a hopeless maze of branching caverns created by random acts of nature. It was something that had been charted, developed and utilized by people from a forgotten age.
They returned to the top of the wall and scouted a route down into the wild forest. Because it had been constructed using pieces of stone, rather than large cut blocks, there were ample hand and foot holds, which Queen, an accomplished rock climber, negotiated with the ease of a spider. The larger Rook was less graceful. When he was about halfway down, a rock shifted under his foot and broke loose, unleashing a small avalanche. As he slid down the nearly vertical face, he rolled away from the cascade of falling stones.
Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team) Page 25